... headquarters [p . 122]. But since this, like most of the assertions in these later chapters, is not sourced there is no way to check.) Diehards 1920-79?And this is a history built on a theory. In the early post-World War One years, there emerged a nationalistic section of the Tory Party called the Diehards. Hughes purports to trace them all the way from 1920 to Mrs Thatcher's triumph in 1979. At least that is how it looks most of the time, although sometimes it's Diehards, with the capital 'D' and sometimes diehards without. Occasionally another grouping, the'Radical Right', (sometimes the radical ...

... , a casualty of the Lynsky Tribunal hearings during the winter of 1948. The Tribunal had been set up by the government to look into the activities of a Polish emigré known as Sydney Stanley who was alleged to have bribed John Belcher, a Labour M.P . and Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade. Headline news in the Tory press for several weeks, the case looked like becoming a major scandal and political problem for the Labour Party. But when the Tribunal finished and nothing of consequence was discovered, everyone wondered what this minor tale of black market racketeers in ration-bound Britain had really been about. Looking at the transcripts 40 years on it all seems ...

... view from the bridge Maggie, Maggie, Maggie Giles Scott-Smith,(1 ) who wrote about the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Lobster 36 and 38 , has written a very interesting study of Margaret Thatcher's first visit to America in 1967.(2 ) Scott-Smith shows that Thatcher, then a junior shadow spokesperson in the Tory Party, was talent-spotted by the State Department's man in the London embassy who liaised with the Tory Party, and was sent on a six week freebie in 1967 c/o the State Department's International Visitor Program. While there she was given VIP treatment and introduced to many big figures in American politics and business (described in ...

... during the less propitious period that can probably be dated from the work-to-rule in power stations in the winter of 1970-1971 that introduced Britain to the alarming experience of widespread blackouts. The author is good on Macmillan, a champion house-builder in the post- war years who detested unemployment: 'Macmillan was an uncomfortable Tory; between the wars he had opposed the party leadership on the appeasement of Germany and on economic policy. Surveying the wreckage of traditional British industries, Macmillan had urged politicians, industrialists and investors to abandon their commitment to liberal economics and pursue not self-interest but a "national economic policy", their actions guided by a State ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 36) Winter 1998/9 Last | Contents | Next Issue 36 Price of Power: The Secret Funding of the Tory Party Colin Challen Vision Paperbacks, London, 1998, 7.99 It says something about this society of ours - and about the academics who make a living teaching what they call 'politics' - that this is the first book about the funding of the political party which has been in power for most of this century; and it says something else that despite Challen's pulling together of the available material - some chapters have over 70 endnotes - at least half of the Conservative's recent ...

... Left Party is not going to be 'Naderite' (Red/Green) but atavistic urban Marxist and dominated by 'reactionary' and sectarian interests. In short, the disillusioned democratic libertarian socialist tradition has little option but to return to a New Labour fold that sets fair to accommodate its concerns over time - albeit in part because no non-Tory alternative vehicle exists or is likely to exist in order to accept it. Placing the opportunistic Liberal Democrats to one side, we now glance at the Tory conundrum. We see not only a complete busted flush politically but one which has become a spoiler for any 'transvaluation of values' in politics. It is like a dead-weight ...

... GB 75 in 1974 and '75. These antecedents stretch back through every decade at least as far back as World War 1, show the kind of continuity of belief, personnel and action visible elsewhere on the Right; and, here as elsewhere in the history of the British Right, there is little information readily available. Other than the Tory Party itself, the only significant organisation which has survived on the Right since the 1920s is the Economic League, running a large-scale intelligence operation against the Left and the unions under cover of its propaganda operations. Continuously funded and staffed by British capital for over half a century, the Economic League has to be taken seriously. ...

... who would drag the Party away from electability, a centralist but populist approach could inspire a million members to return to a youthful, reinvigorated centre-left. The funds could then be used to increase the political strike power of the Leader's Office and to invest in the sort of advanced marketing techniques that Saatchi & Saatchi had deployed for the Tory Party. Of course, this did not happen. New Labour's membership sunk to about 200,000 members, many of them disenchanted, while the Opposition Tories are drifting towards the 300,000 mark. Apart from the so-called Short money, neither political party can currently call on the public purse for much support (unless ...

... , the Economic League's manual Companies under Attack, had already targetted a number of these charities for criticism -- but they were, nevertheless, the group most publicly associated with it. In June 1987 they published a report on Christian Aid (researched by David Neil- Smith) which was well received by conservative newspapers; and at the Tory Party conference in October that year the charities were the main target of the Goalies fringe meeting, 'Alms for the Poor or Arms for Communism? ' This campaign continued in 1989, concentating on the charities involved in 'Central America week'. A 'special' Western Goals (UK) report, written by Michael McCrone and Gideon Sherman ( ...

... replace Thatcher in this respect, Wyatt was soon engaged in cultivating him. This was his only value to Murdoch. Murdoch and Major The third volume of the diaries chronicles Major's falling out with Murdoch and Murdoch's embrace of Tony Blair. The cause of the parting of the ways was, from Wyatt's account, the Murdoch press's relentless persecution of Tory ministers, including Major himself, and their futile attempts to retaliate. (3 ) This is not a story that has appeared anywhere else, perhaps because of what it tells us about the realities of British democracy. On 19 January 1993 Wyatt told Major that the Sun had staked out a house 'where they think you have a girlfriend ...